30 Minutes in Paris

I went to Paris today. For half an hour. That’s the time it takes a person to sprint from terminal 2C to terminal 2F, jump the security queue and collapse exhausted on seat 10A of the flight out. The lady at the Air Bulgaria desk in Sofia expressed surprise that I was flying from Sofia to Amsterdam today, what with there being no flights in that direction. Fortunately the airline computers were equal to this, and had me going to Paris first, and then to Amsterdam, and then a six hour wait and then a flight back to Hull.

Lovely.

Fortunately I managed to sprint across the airport and made it  just in time. The rest of the journey passed without incident, although Schipol airport is not actually the most inspiring place to spend the best part of a working day.

The whole trip was worth it though. I’ve met some splendid folks and had a great time. I know it is very dangerous to extrapolate a whole race and culture just from the few people from there you happen to meet (I dread to think what would happen if folks started thinking all English people were like me) but I really liked the Bulgarians I met up with (and I saw quite  a few when we were “Speed dating” on Tuesday). They don’t suffer fools gladly. If you ask a confirming question (which I am wont to do), for example “So that means the Airport Shuttle will be leaving at 5:00 am?” they will look at you as if you are an idiot, bearing in mind they have just told you this. Actually, thinking about it, it was a rather idiotic question though…

Bulgarians also seem to have an earnest seriousness when you first meet them, but this quickly turns to riotous humour – which is great.

We went out for a meal last night. Great food and the beer was really nice but we had to have several glasses just to make sure..

Sofia airport coffee at 5:45 am..

Windows Phone at MS Days

Did my second session of the day on Windows Phone. This is some of the audience before the start. Thanks for being another great audience folks.  Everything worked, in some cases eventually. My “party piece du-jour” was to start the program on the device rather than the emulator. I did it pretty much every time, in the end the people watching were spotting it before I did.

I got a question about Windows Phone Marketplace during the talk and I said I’d follow up on these pages. As I understand it this is as much a legal as a technical issue, in terms of how the law works in Bulgaria. At the moment you have to go through another publisher I’m afraid, which means people like http://appamundi.com/Publishing/ or http://www.yallaapps.com/.

You can find all the content from the lecture, including slides and demos, here.

After I’d finished I had a wander round and took some pictures of the conference.

Who knows what goes on behind these doors….

Nice Banner

Windows Phone, Bulgarian style

The conference is being held in a huge cinema multiplex. If you hurry you might make one of the 10:00 showings..

Nice Lights

Fun at Microsoft Days

Got my conference badge this morning, along with a very fancy pin which marks me out as a speaker at the conference. I got in and got set up and then went and watched one of the keynote sessions. The first part was in Bulgarian, which was pretty much lost on me I’m afraid, but the main talk was by Mingfei Yan, who talked about the cloud and how it is going to change everything. I reckon all of our students should see this, lots of food for thought about the way that computing is going.

At one point she showed some augmented reality, where a 3D car model was streamed down onto a marker on a piece of paper. Great fun.

Then it was time for my Micro Framework session.

Everything worked and I had a great audience. This is some of them as the room filled up. Some great questions and a round of applause at the end. Although it was probably for the robot.

I’ve put all the resources for the talk here.

On now to experts lounge and then the Windows Phone talk.

Hello Bulgaria

Flew out to Sofia today to give some sessions at Microsoft Days 2011. The journey out was complicated slightly by a two hour delay on the  flight from Amsterdam to Sofia. They didn’t actually announce “The flight is being held up while we put the seat in front of Rob into the ‘permanently reclined’ position” but I think that is probably what happened.

Anyhoo, I made it in the nick of time for our trip to a local university Damien Caro and myself met up with a bunch of students and, once we managed to make our laptops talk to the projector, we had a great time. I gave a demonstration of my silly robot and a Windows Phone game involving cheese. Damien talked about the Cloud which is going to change our lives.

I took a picture just as everyone was leaving. Thanks for being a great audience folks.

Starting the speed dating

Then. straight after our lecture, it was time to head off to a trendy city centre bar for some ‘speed dating’ with journalists. This was one of the most intense things I’ve ever done. We had five minutes with each person and we were shouting introductions, questions and answers over each other. Great fun, although I ended up a little hoarse by the end.

One journalist had this amazing handbag.

After that it was time to head back to the hotel and make sure that my little robot knows his lines for tomorrow.

Three Thing Game Judging Videos

If you want to see what the teams came up with at the end of the game event, and how well students can function after sleep deprivation and lots of caffeine and sugar, then they are all now available on youtube. Just search for threethinggame These videos are in High Definition, as I’m sure you will spot.

We had Paul Ross from Criterion Games here today (they are the studio behind titles such as Burnout) to give a talk on game development and chat with our students. This was the cue for lots of scrambling for Windows Phone devices so that some of our team members could show him the things they had made during the competition. By all accounts he was very impressed, which is nice.

Anyone who missed out on taking part in the competition this time round needn’t worry. Three Thing Game will be back next semester.